The kids have realised, through a sequence of disturbing domestic events, that they already exist in an environment with no behavioural limits, so perhaps they have decided that they may as well live without structural ones, too.

This adaptation of the bestselling memoir by Augusten Burroughs is all about what happens when the sane, protective roof normally provided by responsible adults vanishes from an adolescent's existence.

The youngsters here aren't exactly run-of-the-mill, but next to their grown-up counterparts, they look positively rational.

At the age of 12, Burroughs (whose hobbies include wrapping his pet dog in tinfoil) is sent to live with his mum's psychologist, Dr Finch.

What follows is undoubtedly weird (Finch wakes up the entire household to examine his bowel movements) but would have been considerably weirder if Burroughs' life with his parents - an alcoholic father and a fruitcake mother - had been less odd.

Controversy is currently raging over Burroughs' book, the latest in a line of troubled adolescent memoirs to have the veracity of its facts called into question.

Sony Pictures made an out-of-court settlement with the Turcottes, the family on whom the Finches were based, and Burroughs still faces a lawsuit from them regarding the book's content.

This has helped generate hype for the film, but it also makes it harder to believe in the central character's plight - particularly since the director seems so keen to sentimentalise it.

Whatever Burroughs' memoir was guilty of, it was not feeling sorry for itself. The book breezed through its more introspective moments, keen to find the next bit of psychobabble to ridicule.

The film, however, lingers and stares blankly, as if in the same Valium-induced stupor as Burroughs' mother, played by Annette Bening.

Bening has never been better, while Brian Cox, as Dr Finch, has a wild-eyed smugness that is uncannily true to the mental picture I'd already formed of the shrink.

But Joseph Cross's ineffectual Augusten made me long for the far more authentically vulnerable Lou Taylor Pucci from Thumbsucker, another, much better, recent film about stifled adolescence.

Most of the trouble, though, stems from pace and editing, not performances. Ironically, one senses that what Running With Scissors needed most of all was a few good snips. TOM COX